Off Side (17 page)

‘I know where to get some.’

‘For me too?’

These words had been spoken by some
alter ego
that he had inside him, but none the less he didn’t retract them. All trace of irony had disappeared from her face; now it showed only wanting, and a willingness to please.

‘As much as you want.’

‘I’ve never taken it before.’

‘I’ll show you how.’

‘Where?’

‘Don’t you worry about that. You just give me the money and I’ll go and score. Give me fifteen thousand pesetas. Are you carrying that much?’

He nodded, but delayed reaching for the wallet in the back pocket of his trousers. They looked at each other as if to see who was going to speak first.

‘Don’t you trust me?’

‘It’s not that.’

‘Yes it is. It’s all right. I understand. You follow me. We’ll go to Plaza Real, and you’ll see how I get the stuff. You keep at a bit of a distance, so as not to get involved, and I promise you, if you’ve never tried it before, you’ll never forget it.’

He paid the bill and followed her down calle de San Pablo to the Ramblas. She was running more than walking, and he was trying to hide his excitement as he followed her with his hands in his pockets, his head held high, and his legs trying to look as if they weren’t really hurrying at all. When they arrived at the arcades in the square, she went on ahead and slowed down a bit, as if on the look-out for punters. She had already spotted a pair
of men drinking beers on one of the terraces. She went over to them, looking for all the world as if she had just run into a pair of old acquaintances. She put up a good performance, but the two men weighed her up with a look of calculated irony in their eyes. However, when she tucked the money under the tray that still bore the remains of a
moules marinières
, the two men’s air of remoteness suddenly disappeared, and one of their four hands reached into a pocket and re-emerged to shake the woman’s hand as she turned on her heels to leave. As far as Palacín could see, she had just met a couple of old friends, and when she came back over he immediately began to repent of his impulse. In fact he hurried ahead of her to tell her that she could keep the money, because he was no longer interested in the cocaine.

‘I’ve got it. It’s in my bag.’

They returned to calle de San Olegario, went down calle San Rafael and turned into an entry that smelt of cats’ piss and fossilized filth. They went up the broken brick stairs and arrived at a door covered with layers of paint accumulated over the best part of three centuries. She inserted a heavy iron key into the lock and turned it, but the door barely shifted.

‘Shit. The son of a bitch is inside.’ She kicked the door a couple of times and shouted: ‘Come on! Move the bucket and open the door!’

It was a while before there was any sign of life from inside, but then came the sound of something metal being put on the floor and a chair being dragged aside. The door opened to reveal a corridor full of junk. In the middle of the corridor stood a young man in his underpants, with a bucket of water at his feet and his eyes seemingly unable to focus on what he was seeing.

‘OK, scram. I’m here with a client.’

‘With a client? I thought I told you not to bring people up …’

‘Scram, I said.’

The young man studied Palacín and the woman in turn, and all of a sudden it dawned on him: ‘You’re not here to screw!
You’ve been out to score! I know you, you bitch! You never come here to screw!’

‘Scram, or you’ll get no more dope for a month.’

‘What’s it worth for me to go?’

‘I’ll make it worth your while.’

He walked in front of them to a room which a lone mattress in the middle of the floor had transformed into their bedroom, and from the floor he picked up a pair of crumpled trousers that would have looked good on a scarecrow, together with a pullover which he put on with nothing underneath. He didn’t look at them again, even when she followed him out. Once he had left, she put the chair and the bucket back in their rightful place. Then she ran back down to the room and gestured to Palacín to sit on the mattress.

‘I’m afraid we haven’t any chairs. I’ll go and get things ready.’

She disappeared and returned with a mirror and the tube of a ballpoint pen without its inky heart.

‘Do you want me to strip?’

‘No. It’s OK.’

‘Any time you want me to strip, just say the word.’

She sat next to Palacín and unclenched her hand to reveal a small white paper packet. She opened it and showed him the fine white dust inside.

‘There it is. Life itself. Better than life, in fact. Better than anything at all. I think they won’t have cut it too much. I know the dealer, and he might be a son of a bitch but he treats his regulars properly. He’s a decent sort.’

She traced two lines of coke across the mirror and sniffed one of them up one nostril, using the barrel of the ballpoint. She breathed in deeply and let her head fall back as if she was trying to absorb the dust deep inside her. Then she handed the mirror and the tube to Palacín.

‘Block one nostril, silly. How are you going to sniff it up if you use both nostrils.’

Palacin saw the line of dust disappear, and noticed a slight tickling sensation in his nostril, which made him twitch as only air began to come up the tube.

‘You’ll see — it’s brilliant.’

Her voice had changed. Her eyes had become beautiful. Beautiful and kind. As if they were kissing him.

When Gerardo Passani had been hired as the club’s coach, the appointment had been made bearing in mind the role that Mortimer was going to be playing in the tactical scheme of things. Passani had a worldwide reputation for his theory of the double midfield, which some Italian journalist had chosen to define as ‘schizocentrocampism’. Basically the theory involved expanding the midfield to six players who doubled up into an advanced midfield and a rearguard midfield; up front a lone centre forward would open spaces and wait for balls from the three advanced midfield players, all of whom had been selected for their speed and their ability to shoot from outside the area. These six men were the key, and on the manager’s blackboard they were represented in the following formula:

The formula never failed, and the final outcome produced a surprising logic, as Passani stressed, because the six who opened the formula were not necessarily the same six as the six who closed it. He stressed the point: six does not invariably equal six; it might equal 6AR. In other words, having been recreated via the process of the double midfield, the six midfield players became something more than just six midfield players, because they assumed
a double quality as both attackers and defenders, simultaneously complementary and interchangeable. During the first month of training, Passani was very insistent on his tactical system during the theoretical sessions that he organized for the players, and when Mortimer joined the team — still recovering from an injury incurred during an England game — there was no problem in adapting the tactical schema, because the particular characteristics of Mortimer’s style of play made him the ideal final point, the receptive and transformatory destination of the work of his six team-mates, whether you saw them simply as six, or as 6AR. Passani derived a second formula from this complementarity, which he summed up as follows:

From this it could be deduced that the opposition defenders might at any given moment find themselves facing an unstoppable mathematical formula in the shape of the following:

3R + 3A + M = 6ARM

This would be too much for the limited abstractive capacities of the average Spanish footballer, reasoned Passani, who, although Italo-Argentine by birth, had learned most of his footballing theory in English clubs. What was certain, however, was that the remaining four players had been showing signs of an inferiority complex ever since the first match they had played under this schema. This was because they saw no place for themselves on the digital electronic screen which Passani controlled via a remote control button.

‘What about us, coach? How do we fit in?’

Passani was of the opinion that the other four players, although important, did not form part of the decisive punch, and therefore did not need mathematicization — a neologism which sounded very elegant in his half-Buenos Aires, half-Genoese pronunciation:
matematicasion
. However, since the four were obviously getting frustrated at having been left out of his game-plan, he was obliged to conjure up additional letters which he then tried to embody into a wider, more general formula. Each of the other players received one of the four final letters of the alphabet: the goalkeeper was W, and the three defenders became X, Y and Z. They too played a twin role in a doubling up advance-and-rearguard operation which at any moment could be reinforced by the 3R that were moving in front of them. Passani contrived to sum up his overall strategy in the following eloquent formula:

W + XYZ(A)(R) + 6RA + M = 11
.

It was evident to all that only Mortimer was favoured with his own personal initial, and not all the players were happy with this. However the fact remained that Mortimer was the star of the show, and was the man that the fans were coming to see, so the protests evaporated almost as soon as they were formulated. There was no preferential treatment as regards access to equipment, or lockers in the changing rooms, or use of the showers — although both Passani and Camps O’Shea tried to persuade the rest of the team to leave the covered pool in the changing rooms free for a bit so that Mortimer could do the floating exercises which Passani had prescribed for his muscles. That afternoon, as the players relaxed after a training session, Passani explained further: ‘The aim is effectively to create twenty players out of the basic eleven. You can do the sums yourselves: Mortimer and the goalkeeper are fixed numbers — in other words, one plus one. However the three defenders and the six mid-field players double up so that they become two times nine — i.e. eighteen — and if
I’m not mistaken eighteen plus two makes twenty.’

At the start, Mortimer showed misgivings about Passani’s formulas, because, he said, he was never any good at maths. However he was eventually pulled into line by the manager’s ponderous verbosity — not least because Passani was able to express himself in English (a qualification that had been considered essential for any manager hoping to get the best out of the fans’ future hero). Mortimer jotted down the manager’s theories, and went over them every night with Dorothy and her aunt, both of whom had a better head for maths than he did. The English threesome were apparently unaware of the fact that Carvalho was following them around in the hope that he might spot some clue as to the origin of the threatening letters. The club’s players had assumed that Carvalho was carrying out some kind of complicated research project. He was evidently studying the players, but he didn’t bother them, and after a while they hardly even noticed that he was there.

Carvalho soon began to be bored by the endless theory and practice sessions, and Passani’s baroque syntax was starting to get on his nerves. The detective welcomed the end of these sessions, and the moment when the real Mortimer emerged, with the air of a young man-about-town, to be received warmly by Dorothy and her aunt and to be wrapped in a more or less invisible protective cocoon which comprised a couple of policemen and two private security guards, plus Carvalho when he decided it was worth trailing round after them in the hopes of identifying likely or possible threats to Mortimer’s well-being. More to the point — and professional reasons apart — Carvalho enjoyed feasting the eyes of his desire on Dorothy’s body, which was trim and well proportioned despite her incipient pregnancy. She had the looks of a healthy red-head, the owner of a carnality which was contained in loose one-piece outfits, belted at the waist in order to establish their own brand of double midfield, like two fragments of one single magnetic, erotic field onto which Carvalho’s eyes settled
like a vulture, with his nostrils twitching like a vampire. Vampire. Carvalho had recently begun to think of himself as a vampire, ever since he had noticed a tendency in himself to lust after the young blood of girls who could easily have been his daughters, a circumstance in which the principal moral problem was how to overcome the aesthetic taboo of incest. On occasion he would pursue his theoretical reflections to the point of concluding that he found it necessary to seek rejuvenation through young bodies, but this mechanism of legitimation was a shade too sophisticated for his taste. He fancied young flesh, it was as simple as that — but the fancying was in inverse proportion to what he actually dared to do, which was becoming increasingly limited by his sense of the ridiculous and his sense of an encroaching old age which he didn’t really feel in himself, but which he was beginning to notice in the way other people looked at him. From a distance, Mortimer was enjoying his role as a young, playful husband, exchanging kisses with his wife several times an hour, while the aunt talked and talked as if she wanted to leave her entire philosophy for the couple to continue to savour once she herself had returned to England. In the aunt’s opinion, Spain was rather too much for Jack and Dorothy, and on occasion, from a neighbouring table in some high-class restaurant, Carvalho was able to study the lady’s deontology, and particularly her preoccupation with the lack of seriousness shown by Latin peoples in the matter of consumer goods.